Clojure’s core.async deliberately doesn’t expose a channel’s underlying buffer to the user. This is fine most of the time and encourages good practices and to use the library in an idiomatic way. However occasionally you do want to peer inside a channel. To get access to the buffer, call (.buf ch). Some interesting methods you might like to call on the buffer:

N.B. This is definitely not recommended for production usage. Accessing a channel’s buffer isn’t thread safe, and it breaks a lot of guarantees that core.async provides. However as an aid in debugging at development time it can be quite handy.

Sometimes when you’re working with Clojure maps you want to get both the key and the value together. To do this, use find. find returns a clojure.lang.MapEntry which looks and smells like a two element vector, and can be manipulated like one.

Slava Akhmechet (cofounder of RethinkDB) has a great article on Github issue etiquette. These etiquette guidelines are also just good communication principles in general. The RethinkDB team’s communication on GitHub, IRC, Email, and Twitter are great examples of what this looks like, and I always have a good feeling after communicating with them.

The high level points are below, read the article for the full details and examples.